You’ve probably heard the term love handles a thousand times by now. I used to think it simply meant the sides of a person’s waist that are sometimes held by a partner during intimate moments together. Love handles do indeed refer to the sides of the abs and waist, but love handles happen when you add a few extra pounds around the middle.
A good way to check if you have love handles is through a simple test called the “pinch an inch” test. This is used to test for excess body fat and can also tell you if you have love handles. Simply attempt to pinch the sides of your waist or navel area and if you can grab hold of an inch or more of that area without it slipping easily from your grasp then you have love handles.
The problem with love handles is that they are very difficult to get rid of for a couple reasons. First, while your workout routine may have exercises that focus on the stomach and abs, you may not be working the sides of the abs, more scientifically known as the obliques. The second issue is that fat naturally goes straight to the love handle area.
Love handle elimination takes regular exercise over an extended period of time. Spot treatment is not effective, and love handles require you to lose overall body fat before they’ll disappear. In addition, an elevated metabolic rate will greatly assist you in losing the necessary weight to make love handles disappear forever.
Be sure to add resistance training to your cardio workouts in order to increase your metabolic rate. Resistance training gives your metabolism a boost — more muscle requires more calories to maintain — making it a very important part of your workout plan if you want to see good results. Also, be sure to eat breakfast every morning and try to eat smaller meals with greater frequency throughout the day. This helps to keep your blood sugar and insulin levels constant. You’ll have the added benefit of steady energy, and workout recovery is aided as well.
With a little patience and perseverance — and some basic knowledge of how the whole diet and exercise process works — your love handle exercises will work much faster than you think!